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Comment by The_Double | Hacker News Reader

The strangest thing to me is that apparently this material has been developed years ago, the video of a piece floating was uploaded 3 months ago, and apparently it's easy to produce more samples, but the papers still reads like they have been thrown together in less than a week. (English might not be their first language, but the presentation of the figures is also poor) And it also seems like they haven't spent that time by doing high quality experiments. Surely if you have found a magic material that can change the world you would spend more effort than this on doing experiments and publishing a good paper as soon as possible.

The low quality video and poorly presented graphs are reminiscent of Victor Ninov's fraud.

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> Surely if you have found a magic material that can change the world you would spend more effort than this on doing experiments and publishing a good paper as soon as possible.

Meh, it's just as easy to assume the opposite. Who has a stronger incentive to present themselves in the best possible light, a con artist, or a future noble prize winner with a patent on an earth-shattering technology? For the former, the credulity of the reader is necessary for the success of the con! For the latter, not so much, as the truth will be self evident in short order.

I read somewhere once that deliberately poor quality graphs are sometimes used so that readers cannot extract the precise values from them. This could be to obscure fake or real data.

This is true, but from personal experience, academics are terrible at including high quality images. My colleague would screenshot an image from some visualisation software and paste it in to her paper in MS Word. Then that image would get copied or screenshotted into a different word document, and so on, and the quality would deteriorate.

My wife is an academic and I often see her screenshoting to move an image from one document to another. Seems like a UI failure that the system can't detect this use case and move high quality backing images through the clipboard.

MacOS went full circle here at least with regards to text: In the new MacOS versions, if you screenshot text there's automatic OCR, so when you receive a screenshot of some text, you can copy it again!

It's non-trivial to implement that for something like SVG's, but if UI developers had anticipated this use case, we might have gotten a remedy with the introduction of raster graphics.

It seems weird because it's a big leap but big leaps do happen.

If it is a misrepresentation I'd be curious about the back story. I mean, even if it's not been knowingly done it will presumably seriously hurt the careers of the people involved; if it is knowingly I assume it will be "find a job in another field" kind of thing.

How could you suspect it wouldn't come out if it's knowingly? If un-knowingly how could you make an amazing claim like this without being absolutely sure of what's going on? If it's a "rush to publish" type thing - why wouldn't you make a big point of that in the paper (i.e. load it with caveats to the brim)? Plus this comment makes it sounds like it's been sat on for at least what seems to me like a fair amount of time.

All the options seem implausible but at the end of the day one of them must be the case. For the sake of everyone I'm pulling that it is what it says on the tin.

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